LB’s Record Bar — Melbourne CBD — vinyl-led, late-night
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: LB’s Record Bar
Address: 12 Meyers Place, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia
Website: —
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lbsrecordbar
Melbourne has always understood that music lives best in the in-between spaces. Not the obvious rooms, not the big stages, but the laneways where sound seeps out between brickwork and conversation. Meyers Place has long been one of those arteries — a narrow cut through the CBD where jazz, cocktails, and late nights have learned to coexist. LB’s Record Bar slots into that lineage with confidence, not by shouting louder, but by choosing vinyl as its spine.
You feel it immediately. This is not a bar that uses records as décor. It is a bar that allows records to lead. The room is compact, social, deliberately intimate — a horseshoe bar anchoring the space, bodies leaning inward, attention drifting naturally toward the turntables. The sound isn’t museum-quiet; it’s alive, warm, human. Vinyl here isn’t precious, it’s active — records are played because they move the room, not because they deserve reverence.
LB’s sits in that sweet Melbourne overlap between listening and nightlife. DJs are local, rotating, and deeply embedded in the city’s record culture. The selections lean broad rather than doctrinal — soul, disco, funk, left-field electronic, the odd curveball — all chosen with an understanding of pacing rather than performance. You’re not being instructed what to feel; you’re being carried somewhere slowly, drink in hand.
The bar programme mirrors that same looseness with intent. Cocktails lean modern, confident, and unfussy — drinks designed to travel well through conversation and sound rather than interrupt them. There’s an unmistakable late-night intelligence here: flavours that hold up as the room fills, ice that lasts, pours that encourage staying rather than rushing. Food, where present, supports rather than distracts — small, shareable, and built for lingering.
What makes LB’s notable in the context of listening culture is its refusal to be overly didactic. This isn’t a hi-fi temple demanding silence, nor a club chasing volume. It sits in the middle ground — a social listening bar where music matters, but people matter just as much. The sound system is there to serve the room, not dominate it. The records are there to connect people, not separate them into experts and novices.
For Tracks & Tales, LB’s Record Bar represents a distinctly Melbourne expression of the listening bar idea: casual, confident, culturally literate, and unafraid of pleasure. It’s the kind of place you drop into “for one” and leave two hours later with a new record in your head and a reason to come back.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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